Susan Grelock-Yusem
Head of Strategy and Innovation
Fellow
Susan is a depth-based community psychologist who has built teams and led communications for over 20 years in the regenerative food space. Her work is centered in the imaginal and narrative repair. She is a reader, writer, and runner.
Susan is a researcher, storyteller, and super-curious human. She believes that psychology can be a generative force for environmental sustainability and social justice.
She loves bringing together teams and developing workshop environments, where everyone rolls up their sleeves and creates something together. During her past experience in communications and marketing, she built and led creative teams at Whole Foods Market, organic innovator Amy’s Kitchen, and a leading conservation nonprofit in the Pacific Northwest. As marketing lead at Patagonia’s start-up regenerative food division, she dove deep into video production and image-driven storytelling. As a studio art assistant, she has been joyfully immersed in the flow at the community studios Creativity Explored and Drawbridge.
She has a researcher’s inquisitive mind and is at home with participatory designs and qualitative methods, especially interviews and narrative inquiry. Her PhD is in depth psychology with a specialization in community, liberation, and eco-psychologies. She marries her inquisitive mind to her experience with creative production, like events, podcasts, and print design, to develop arts-based engagements.
For her doctoral research she circled around the Yellowstone to Yukon corridor interviewing biologists, artists, and activists about their work and connection to wolves. Usually they were somewhere outside, often within earshot of wolves. Always sparks of unexpected insight emerged from the conversations.
